Love Moves To Alpha Testing 4
An anonymous reader writes "Love, the home-made MMO game by Eskil Steenberg, has hit alpha. Check out the News page for details on the testing. A Linux version of the game is a possibility; Steenberg said, 'The numbers right now look good (around 1600 players), but I don't trust that that many will return next month, so I would still say the viability of the project is in limbo. In order to do ports to OSX and Linux I will need at least 2000 returning players.' Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently got a look at an early version of the game."
This is Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a lazy bastard, so rather than write a whole new post for this, I'm just going to copy and paste what I wrote on another forum.
About a month or two ago, I heard of this interesting project for an MMO of sorts being produced by a company called Quel Solaar [quelsolaar.com]. This game is supposed to be experimental in that it isn't as massive as other MMOs, with each server being limited to perhaps 300-500 players, the game world is entirely modifiable, with players and AI making constant changes to the landscape, and it is also experimental in that it is meant to provide a reasonably modern game with only one person making it. In an age when develop teams of a hundred or more are the norm, Eskil Steenberg has created the tools and an engine which can produce a fully realized game by one person. This game is his work of Love [quelsolaar.com].
He recently released an alpha of it, which can be freely downloaded, though connecting to a server runs €3 a month. It is indeed in alpha state in that while it is fully playable and in more or less complete form, it has major balance issues. The AI is relentless after a recent update, and people have trouble building up settlements that last more than a few hours. There isn't a great deal to the game. The primary gameplay factor is that it changes over time, with new settlements being created and recreated. There is no direct PvP. Griefing is possible, but the intent is to have players work together against the AI, building up competing settlements. Users create account names, but the player names are generated by the games. This is excellent to me, as it prevents the inundation of "BritneySpears22" and "M45T3R_BL45T3R" style player names.
Graphically, the game is actually rather simple. The whole system is based upon blocks, but the engine applies a great deal of variation to the blocks, which allows for terrain to combine in unique compositions throughout the gameworld. Eskil himself used [vimeo.com] the example of trees in the game. Every single tree in the game is based upon the same model. The variations in the trees are created from the details of the blocks upon which they're placed, which makes a forest of trees actually look like a bunch of different trees of the same type. You can potentially create a line of the same tree over and over when creating a settlement, but this requires "planting" the trees on the same size and shape blocks. In addition to the variation on the building blocks of the game, there are previously designed bits - the trees, as mentioned, as well as various forms of stairs and bridges. There are also graphical filters added to make different "materials" and to add a somewhat cartoonish fuzziness to the game. These combine in such a way that the game can be played on relatively weak hardware, using relatively few OpenGL calls to produce these effects.
The game world actually forms around a sphere of sorts, created by taking a cube and "smoothing" it over. This means that a player could potentially circumnavigate it, and it allows for a night and day system created by having a "sun" going around the world (or the world going around the "sun", I don't know which). This is especially noticeable when traveling far from a chosen respawn point, as I have died during the late day of one part of the world only to respawn and find it to be night time.
Well, I've gone on far too long as it is, but I'm honestly very excited by this game. It's more of a proof of concept rather than a full game, but it has so many cool ideas, and with all the variation in a gameworld, I can go in after a day and expect to find new settlements and new terrain. It's a marvel of one man's creativeness and ingenuity that I really hope has a powerful impact on future games. It is a bit difficult to get into at first - it has a steep learning curve to start, in part because of the unreal look to the game. It takes time to get your bearings and in the meantime, you